Chia Amisola My computer never asks me how many computers I had before
Internet artist Chia Amisola performs the browser, and treats the browser as performance in a hypertext symphony of desktop & live ambient.
Chia Amisola
My computer never asks me how many computers I had before
Opening performance by exteeng
Friday, July 26, 2024
Doors: 8PM
All Ages
Standing Performance
View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests.
About the Show
"Let's turn our computers into flowers, rains, suns..."
Join us at Gray Area on July 26th for a special evening of ambient performances, led by Gray Area Incubator Artist Chia Amisola. Headlining with their poetic ambient work, My computer never asks me how many computers I had before, Amisola will be joined by multimedia artist and DJ exteeng and other invited artists exploring the boundaries of sound, HTML, and live A/V performance.
Amisola's internet ambient performances splay hundreds of windows across the screen, inhabiting the internet as they read the text on a website, its metadata, desktop icons, the terminal, and then their own browser history. Accompanied by live ambient and samples drawn from fields to abandoned blogs, their performances live between a poetry reading, desktop performance, and durational ambient performance. Intimate as it is inhabited and embodied, they click, scroll, stutter, lag, click, and refresh, bringing us to realize the internet is a place we make, and can fill.
Chia Amisola (b. 2000, Manila) is an internet & ambient artist and designer devoted to the internet’s loss, love, labor, and liberation. Their (web)site-specific practice (websites, tools, performance) posits creation as synonymous with liberation. Activated as 'internet ambient', dense / durational / networked desktop readings where hypertext is performance, they touch on the defaults, opacities, and infrastructural intimacies of the internet as an ecology, territory, and atmosphere.
With practice dating back to 2006, including writing & software (such as gamemaking tools as games), digital intimacy (whenwe.love), placemaking & territories (their manifesto, thesoundof.love, on domain naming), religion & ritual (Visita), folk archival (Philippine Internet Archive), teaching & organizing (including pro-bono organizing 100+ events across 7+ years of programming with Developh), artifacts & performances (the performance of the browser, the browser as performance), amongst others.
They are the organizer of Developh, a critical technology institute based in the Philippines they founded in 2016, and the Philippine Internet Archive. Most recently, they've curated & programmed working on KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN!, an exhibition of Filipino networking cultures. They graduated with a BA in Computing & the Arts with distinction from Yale University in 2022, receiving the Sudler Prize for the creative arts. They currently are a NEW INC Art & Code member, were a Fellow of the Processing Foundation, resident at Gray Area (US), Yale Center for Collaborative Arts & Media, and the Internet Archive's DWeb Camp. They have spoken internationally at the Grace Hopper Celebration (US), Causal Islands, UX+ (Philippines), Naive Yearly (Denmark) have been internationally exhibited at /rosa (Germany) and Now Play This (UK), performed at CultureHub (NYC), panke.gallery (Germany), and 98B (Philippines), recently published in Runway Journal (AUS),Runway Journal (AUS), The HTML Review, and Rappler and have been featured in El País, Frieze, and The New Yorker.
Internet Ambient Workshop
Friday, July 26
5–7PM
Join us for a special workshop-performance led by Chia Amisola before the show. The Internet Ambient Workshop is an introduction to the sound of a poetic & ambient web: shaping ecosystems with computers, website-making as world-making, interdependent internet publishing, and embedding field recording & deep listening practices to the online.
ENROLL
About the Artists
Chia Amisola
Chia Amisola is an artist devoted to the internet's loss, love, labor, and liberation. Their work centers on the intimacies of infrastructures and the labor of tools, as they imagine technology's relationship with agency, ambience, and atmosphere, especially from the third world experience. They work between New York and Manila, Philippines.
exteeng
Chris Giang (exteeng) is a multimedia artist, DJ, and data scientist based in Oakland, CA. Her sonic practice explores the tenderness embedded in the terrain of the ordinary, infusing it with a spirit of experimentation and deconstruction. By fragmenting and reassembling pop culture, she reshapes the familiar into something deeply personal—an expression of the heart. Her live sets form part of a larger sensory practice that intertwines tea, flowers, incense, and handmade ceramics, culminating in immersive tea ceremonies presented at exhibitions and in collaboration with other artists.
Chris is a resident artist and event producer at B4BEL4B, and a member of the Bread SF collective. She frequently performs with local crews such as Fake & Gay, Squish SF, and Generaiderz, and has brought her sound to stages including Boiler Room San Francisco and international venues in Taipei, Seoul, Vancouver, and Hong Kong. Her mixes—featured on NTS, HKCR, IPR, and TCR—can be found on her Soundcloud. (soundcloud.com/exteeng)
In parallel to her audio-visual work, Chris has developed an idol concept around her albino Pekingese, Falkor—a growing creative entity inspired by K-pop culture and digital celebrity. Through Falkor, she explores themes of identity, projection, and influence, expanding his presence as both muse and multimedia persona with his own broader artistic universe.
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